The aim of this research is to describe speech events at the acoustical, perceptual, and physiological levels, and to develop models of the speech production and perception processes. Current work includes examination of the acoustic and articulatory properties of certain speech sounds across a number of languages, in order to be able to describe the universal properties that exist across all languages. Models for the perception of speech are being developed, including a model for access of lexical items and a model based on the detection of properties in phonetic segments. New instrumentation for the study of speech movements (based on a magnetometer approach) and for the synthesis of speech is also being developed.